If you wished for a Broadway show or Debra Messing's return to the stage — or both — when you blew out your birthday candles, you're in luck. Messing will star alongside fellow TV favorites Andre Braugher and Enrico Colantoni in Noah Haidle's Birthday Candles on Broadway. Stay tuned for information about Birthday Candles tickets on New York Theatre Guide soon.
Birthday Candles is a play that follows Ernestine Ashworth (Messing) from her 17th to 101st birthday. She bakes a single birthday cake in that time, the same way her mother taught her. Matt and Kenneth (Braugher and Colantoni, respectively), two boys who first admired Ernestine as teenagers, are the only other constants that remain. Everything and everyone else in Ernestine's life changes as she grows older. She changes from a headstrong, rebellious teen into an adult with a fairly conventional, family-oriented life, and she reflects at every stage on what makes life fulfilling.
Haidle is making his Broadway debut with Birthday Candles in New York. Detroit Public Theatre originally commissioned the play in 2018. Vivienne Benesch directed the premiere, and she will return to direct the Birthday Candles Broadway production. The Detroit production was acclaimed in the Detroit Free Press as "quietly profound" and "one of the most satisfying and moving new plays" in Detroit at the time.
Kate Hopgood will provide original music for the show, and the rest of the creative team includes costume design by Toni-Leslie James, set design by Christine Jones, sound design by John Gromada, and lighting design by Jen Schriever.
Experience Birthday Candles on Broadway and join the party! Birthday Candles tickets will be on sale soon.
(Photo courtesy of Polk & Co.)